videogames

When it comes to the Yakuza series, I’m a bit of a tragic. I love the characters, I love the melodrama, I love the ridiculous sidequests, I love it all. So it comes as no surprise that I love Yakuza 6. While it is pretty much just more of the same old Yakuza that we’ve grown to know and love, there are several quality-of-life improvements that have been made, most of which make the game far more enjoyable. Still, I wouldn’t say it’s my favourite of the series.

On April 26th 2018, Epic Games turned off the servers for their free-to-play third-person MOBA (multiplayer online battle arena), Paragon, after only two short years. While the game did manage to build a fervent community during that time, the number of concurrent players just wasn’t enough to sustain ongoing development, and this was unfortunately impacted by the huge (and largely unexpected) success of Fortnite Battle Royale. Given that game’s unprecedented success, Epic needed to shift resources from one project to another, and unfortunately, something had to give. Long live Paragon.

Given our small population and relative isolation compared to many other Western countries, being Australian has its frustrations at times. We lag behind when it comes to Internet speeds, our pricing is driven northwards by the effect of the “Australia Tax”, and we often find ourselves late to the party in terms of innovation and product release (although it must be said that we do tend to be a testing ground for software releases, as going live in Australia isn’t likely to crush servers).

Being a collector in Australia is also impacted by these issues – on the one hand, we have limited access to items as there are fewer people selling them, but more importantly, given we are now an interconnected world, buying online can come with extremely painful shipping charges. This means that something that would ordinarily cost $50-100 locally could fetch upwards of $150-200 when buying from overseas.

So what are our options here? Are we really just out of luck? In this post, I’ve summarised all the options available to the modern collector (well, all the options I could think of, at least).

I am a child of the ‘80s and ‘90s, so I’ve seen video game coverage in its infancy, and watched as it developed into what it is today. As such, I was an active participant in the golden age of video game magazines, and I saw the shift towards the Internet in the late ‘90s and early 2000s. As I myself matured, I wanted to be a part of the fun, and over the last 10 or so years, I’ve had two or three of my own blogs and written for several independent enthusiast websites. Over time, though, it’s gotten harder – for multiple reasons. On the one hand, there’s just not enough actual jobs out there to make “chasing the dream” a worthwhile use of my time (not to mention the fact that the jobs that do exist probably don’t pay what I would need to survive). On the other, I’m just not sure that what I want to do actually fits into what the industry needs. In fact, I’d even go as far as saying that the industry isn’t really sure what it needs right now.

Free-to-play games are nothing new – in truth, they’ve been around just as long as we’ve had video games, in some form or another. I thought I’d take a look into how and where the idea developed, and where things might go from here.

Hopefully you’ve read my initial impressions of Warframe, so you’ll know I’ve fallen for it. Perhaps as a result of that, you’ve decided to give Warframe a shot – at the very least, the price is right (you can’t beat free). Maybe you’ve played for an hour or so and learned how to manoeuvre your character around the environment only to find – BAM – suddenly you’re on board your ship, the Liset, and left to your own devices. How do you wade through all of this, and what are all these currencies and resources and … how the hell do you even level up??? Well, this is possibly the introduction you’re after. Here, I’ll be outlining/explaining what I learned in my first 25 hours of the game – a beginners overview of Warframe, BY a beginner. Note this is not a guide, just an explanation of how everything works, which I could have used about 20 hours of playtime prior to now…

If the subtext wasn’t clear in my Destiny 2 review, then I’ll just say it out loud – I’m not perfectly happy with Destiny 2. Sure, it’s more Destiny, and considering I spent 1000 hours in that game, that’s certainly not a bad thing, but the problem is that Bungie has simplified the game to cater to a specific audience. My issue is that the game I fell in love with originally was catered to a different audience.